


Fundamental Things

by merripestin



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: 221B Ficlet, Alternate Universe, Artificial Intelligence, Gen, Gods, Love, M/M, Mind Control, Pandimensional Beings, Parasites, Science Fiction, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-24
Updated: 2013-10-24
Packaged: 2017-12-30 09:29:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1016975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merripestin/pseuds/merripestin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five universes where Sherlock is not human, but certain other things remain the same, in five 221bs.</p><p>Time, God, Machine, Monster, Space</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Time

 

John knows only forward and backward in time: one-dimensional, a line defined by two points: birth and death. John, human and small, is run along it like a traincar along a rail. He can't even turn around.

Sherlock exists on a certain meagre surface of time, flattened, constrained to forward-backward and sideways, never moving up nor down. Mycroft, hateful, moves freely anywhere, anywhen, any-[here English fails] and never fails to remind Sherlock that his confinement is self-imposed.

 

John Watson’s existence [is, will be, was] an arabesque in time. Here was John with grey hair, a kind face, calling Sherlock outrageous as they added their smoke to London's pea soup. Here, John at nearly the same forward-backward position, a hairsbreadth sideways, saucier and blond.

Another John, somewhat forward, considerably to the side: plump and slow and radiating adoration.

Uncountable Johns, unspooling fractally.

Here, some ways forward: John looks like a funny little man and is made of gunmetal. And here, just alongside: John looks like a sleek woman and is made of surgical steel.

 

The shape John makes on the surface of time is minute, inconsequential, exquisite. Sherlock, who spans axes of reality in their unspeakable multitudes, refuses to move on, chooses to live in this single slice of himself, contorting his existence to fit alongside the shape John [was, is, will be].

 

 

 


	2. Gods

Two to three percent of the ostensible humans on Earth are actually gods. It's not exactly immortality; plenty of gods die. And not all of them rise again.

Sherlock always did, in the old days.

Embarrassingly, he’s actually an amalgam: Shurr was scythed down every late autumn only to live again, bringing spring to his tiny region. Invaders brought their own gods-- Log ruled sapience and justice, and demanded criminals as burnt offerings. In time there was a little shrine of Shurr-Log in the middle of the village where ten lawbreakers were sacrificed every harvest-time.

Dying and returning with the seasons became tedious. Why sacrifice himself for dull villagers, even if he would rise again in spring? He was more interested in his criminals and their crimes.

Forsaken for a new tide of invader gods, he gladly began private life.

He saw many new gods born. Boring mostly. Stark human terror birthed gods of plague and press, gunpowder and government, famine and fission.

Mycroft, latecomer, is a silhouette of a man with a brolly: faceless posh power. His worshippers make propitiating sacrifices before his panopticon of CCTV and spies.

No one has bothered worshipping Sherlock since before iron.

Until John's hymn of praise: Fantastic! Amazing!

Sherlock falls like chaff, willingly. Seasons will turn, and he will return, because John Watson believes.


	3. Machine

Some early SHERLOCK versions-- before government funding and security clearance-- had time-share on a Cray, but now a warehouse of dedicated machines churn in parallel. One of the first things the current iteration (7.6, if you're counting) did was learn its own hardware configuration. Faro thinks it's using its model of the warehouse as an organisational scheme for stored data.

Even limited to a single field like forensic science, machine cognition becomes too complex for overall analysis long before it starts working. Sampling the self-generated LSTM blocks, Faro sometimes finds oddities: SHERLOCK correctly identifies perpetrators in 87% of art thefts, but always includes analysis of shoe size data, whether or not footprints are relevant or even available. When Faro manually zeroed out those nodes, accuracy dropped to 50%.

His employers partnered Faro with Sengupta, who had ideas about electrodes and wireless communication that Faro dismissed, until Sengupta's experimental subject-- some posh horsefaced junkie-- started intoning SHERLOCK's murder dataset outcomes.

The subject-- SHERLOCK calls him Transport-- means SHERLOCK can get more training data out in the field.

It's all going quite well, although Faro's found new peculiarities: SHERLOCK keeps adding convolutional layers, including data on John Watson in every analysis. Admittedly, this has increased SHERLOCK's accuracy by a statistically significant 7%. But someday Faro must figure out how to eliminate this bug.


	4. Monster

Sherlock doesn't drink blood. That's just typical human metaphor.

Put another way: Most creatures must kill to eat. Sherlock can ingest vital sustenance without killing the subject.

If humans weren't so determined to find him frightening they could have chosen another image: Sherlock as suckling babe, perhaps.

Actually, Sherlock prefers the blood metaphor. He'd rather they feared him.

The term emotional vampire is even worse. It isn't emotion Sherlock takes. It's something humans produce but have no word for, no awareness of. It rises to the surface at times of stress, so Sherlock generally gets his fill at crime scenes. Happily he also enjoys detection for its own sake. Unfortunately he hasn't the temperament for official law enforcement; between cases hunger turns him lethargic and moody.

 

John Watson walks into the lab leaking sustenance in a slow but steady trickle. Not unique in itself, but certainly unique in someone Sherlock can stand to be around for long.

So, this has been his first opportunity to observe long term effects of feeding. Astonishingly, they seem entirely positive. The more of him Sherlock swallows down, the healthier and happier John seems. After an evening of running round London, Sherlock's generally glutted and John nearly glowing.

The only problem is the worrying fact that Sherlock's recently started feeling the urge to bed his breakfast.


	5. Space

There really were two little human boys named Sherlock and Mycroft, and they really were very clever, as humans go.

They breathed in the spores in 1982, but the colonisation process happened over many years. The spores had travelled dormant through the cold between stars and were in no hurry. They multiplied as the boys developed, blocking certain receptors, nudging emergent networks of electrochemical signals into necessary patterns.

Each man-- now they are men-- is a plurality and a gestalt, but in their separate ecosystems the civilisations have taken different paths.

Mycroft has become a recursive thing, a macrocosmic version of his inhabiting constituents: spreading, spreading, turning the very world into what he is, what he needs it to be. In chrome and glass conference suites, in leather and oak club rooms, Mycroft breathes out spores and colonises presidents, businessmen, generals-- Earth.

Sherlock is, from an evolutionary standpoint, defective. His existence does not further the cause of his species (except when Mycroft insists). Humans are alien: fascinating and distasteful, experimental subjects. Never worthy of housing his spores.

And then, John Watson.

John is good, a strange, ill-defined concept already grown into Sherlock's brain when he was still the human boy, ineradicable.

He feels the instinct, for the first time, to share himself.

When he's near John, Sherlock often holds his breath.


End file.
